As I write this we are enroute to Minnesota from Omaha where we spent 48 hours where I was able to anoint two dear friends suffering from cancer: my classmate Bishop Anthony Milone and Dick Gutchweski, an old friend.
Praise God. I could be with them!

The Scriptures today are so rich in their meaning:
First reading" ...you gave your children good ground for hope
That you would permit repentance for your sins."
How beautiful

2nd: "the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness."
Again how consoling to us sinners!

And then we have the parables in the Gospel.
Which might be your favorite?
The seed sown on good ground?
The mustard seed?

"The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness."
This was so true inOmaha when we visited the Omaha Priests'Retirement Center.
We visitors included my cousin Rosemary, her daughter Janet, and son-in-law Larry.
And the visited: Bishop Milone, Monsignor Tom Furlong, and Father Ken Vavrina,
who, in his amazing life journey, worked  personally with Saint Mother Theresa.

Rosemary and Janet had known Furlong and Vavrina from their seminary days in the sixties at Saint Paul Seminary when she her husband George and their 10 children hosted them on their holidays.
So now at age 92 she still considered them "some of her boys."

We were all of us weak in one way or another, "but the Spirit was to come to us in our weakness."
So I anointed my boyhood friend Bishop Milone.
He then anointed me, and then he anointed each of the others.

It was a moving and Spirit filled experience.
lPraise God for the consolations of the anointing!

Pictured Below:
Monsignor Furlong, Me, Bishop Anthony, and Father Vavrina.